• abbotsbury@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    okay but the local man did make a smart argument by identifying the Appeal to Nature fallacy

    • FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Doesn’t evolution highlight thst the hair being there means it WAS/IS useful or wanted? I’m pretty sure those hairs act as a germ net or something, or maybe it’s just because that part of the body is best kept warm.

      • abbotsbury@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        No, evolution allows for vestigial parts all the time. And sometimes random mutations happen and doesn’t make much of a difference so it doesn’t get selected out and now there’s just something there for no reason that never had a purpose.

        I’m pretty sure those hairs act as a germ net or something, or maybe it’s just because that part of the body is best kept warm.

        The biggest argument against that is the fact that humans have lost most of their body hair anyway and still managed to thrive. Not that it makes leg hair bad, but we clearly don’t need it to survive.

    • Avicenna@programming.dev
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      4 hours ago

      I mean not necessarily appeal to nature because the woman does not try to prove that body hair on women are inherently good. She just points out that “not supposed to be there” is as meaningless as saying “your head shouldn’t be on your shoulders”. The rest is personal choice (that is if you can disregard the immense societal pressure).

      • abbotsbury@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        No it was definitely an appeal to nature, “if it isn’t supposed to be there, why is it there?” is asserting that it’s supposed to be there because it naturally grew there. It has nothing to do with the inherent goodness of women, appeal to nature is a logical fallacy where you assert something is good or just because it is natural, e.g. “clothing is bad because we were born naked.”

        Doing a fallacy doesn’t mean she’s wrong (that would be the fallacy fallacy, of course), it just means her reasoning is wrong (plenty of bad or unwanted things are natural).

        • Avicenna@programming.dev
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          4 hours ago

          where you assert something is good

          She is not trying to prove hair leg is good or healthy because they are natural. If anything I would say she is doing a bit of tautology because her argument is along the lines of “they are supposed to be there because there is where they normally are”

          It has nothing to do with the inherent goodness of women,

          What I said had nothing to do with inherent goodness of women. My argument is that she is not trying to state body hair is inherently good and beneficial because of their naturality.

          If it was appeal to nature, would expect something along the lines of “Why do they naturally grow there if it wasn’t good for women”

          • abbotsbury@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            She is not trying to prove hair leg is good or healthy

            She doesn’t need to be proving that leg hair is good or healthy to do a logical fallacy, she is defending that it is right for it to exist (as opposed to it being wrong for hair to be there).

            If anything I would say she is doing a bit of tautology because her argument is along the lines of “they are supposed to be there because there is where they normally are”

            I don’t think that is accurate. She’s saying they are supposed to be there because they grow there, that’s not saying the same thing twice, she is justifying its existence through an appeal to the natural order of it growing there.

            • Avicenna@programming.dev
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              3 hours ago

              She doesn’t need to be proving that leg hair is good or healthy to do a logical fallacy

              She does need to be doing that if you want the logical fallacy to be “appeal to nature fallacy”.

              that’s not saying the same thing twice

              Tatutology is when two seemingly different statements carry the same information. The two different statements in “They are supposed to be there because that is where they naturally are” don’t actually say anything much different. If “naturally” was to be replaced with “normally”, then it would be a complete tautology but I only said a bit of tautology because “naturally” contains more information than “supposed to”. But the whole point of my argument is that I think she is using naturally in lieu of “normally” rather than as a precursor for healthy or good.

              • abbotsbury@lemmy.world
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                3 hours ago

                buddy I think you are really missing the point, let me copy and paste from Wikipedia:

                An appeal to nature is a rhetorical technique for presenting and proposing the argument that “a thing is good because it is ‘natural’, or bad because it is ‘unnatural’ or ‘synthetic’.”[1] In debate and discussion, an appeal-to-nature argument can be considered to be a bad argument, because the implicit primary premise “What is natural is good” has no factual meaning beyond rhetoric in some or most contexts.

                But the whole point of my argument is that I think she is using naturally in lieu of “normally” rather than as a precursor for healthy or good.

                It doesn’t matter if she says “normally” or “naturally,” or if she never says “good” or “healthy;” by using the natural (or normal, or typical, or whatever word you want to use) state of the human body as reason for why it should be there, that is an appeal to nature.

                Wikipedia even has a section about natural/normal:

                In some contexts, the use of the terms of “nature” and “natural” can be vague, leading to unintended associations with other concepts. The word “natural” can also be a loaded term – much like the word “normal”, in some contexts, it can carry an implicit value judgment. An appeal to nature would thus beg the question, because the conclusion is entailed by the premise.[2]

                And in that context, begging the question refers to the actual fallacy, which is:

                begging the question or assuming the conclusion (Latin: petītiō principiī) is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument’s premises assume the truth of the conclusion

                Is that what you mean by tautology?

                • Avicenna@programming.dev
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                  3 hours ago

                  I don’t understand how the fact she never said “body hair is good” does not matter when the very definition of “appeal to nature” requires it: “a thing is good because it is ‘natural’”.

                  I think tautology can be a form of begging the question if it is used as a means of proving a statement. Nevertheless I agree calling it a begging the question is better because that is the actual fallacy I was trying to get at.